30 December 2012

New book: Jared Diamond’s PNG adventures

PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR and anthropologist Jared Diamond has written a new book on his decades of field work in Papua New Guinea.

The World Until Yesterday is Diamond’s most personal book to date, where he examines tribal societies’ approaches to universal human issues such as peace and war, child-rearing, treatment of the elderly, language, religion, and health.

Chronicling his 1964 visit to PNG when it was still under Australian administration, Diamond weighs in on the advantages of modern society (clocks, phones, credit cards, computers) and the disadvantages of tribal society (infanticide, periodic risk of starvation, infectious diseases, fear of attack).

He, however, also highlights the strengths of tribal society: should there be a global catastrophe someday it is the hunters and gatherers who will prevail.

In an excerpt of an interview published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Diamond speaks with his colleague and friend of more than 20 years, Claire Panosian Dunavan MD, a tropical medicine and global health expert.

DUNAVAN: Was this your most personal book?

DIAMOND: Not just my most personal… but most practical book which people can use to modify their lives [in terms of] danger, bringing up children, getting older.

DUNAVAN: I want to hear about your first contact with a traditional society. What was it like?

DIAMOND: Before John (Diamond’s classmate at Harvard) and I went out there [in 1964], I was really naive. I knew New Guineans were primitive people, meaning that they had primitive technology.

I thought there would be something distinctive about their personality and cognition and so on – I fantasized for example, that New Guineans could read minds and that, in a few weeks, I could learn how to read minds. That just shows you how naive I was.

My first night in New Guinea… a [local] physician in the kuru area was eager to get me and John out of his hands as quickly as possible. Instead of easing us in our first night by letting us stay in his house, he told us a bit and drove us to a native village and left us there!

So my first night was spent sleeping in a hut in a village with New Guineans who did not speak English. I did not speak Fore, I did not yet speak Pidgin English (neo-Melanesian). I was tired from the long plane flights from the U.S., so I slept late the next morning.

When I woke up there was the scene that I describe in the book about the little boys playing war. War had ended in this area in 1959. So they were not playing hopscotch, it was serious, it was very realistic.

They were using small bows and arrows, they were darting back and forth, they were doing what the adults do in war. It was clear that this was training. This was my first morning in the New Guinea highlands.

The second night I went down to the village stream to brush my teeth and a New Guinean was there. I had already on that first day started asking the names for things in Fore and I saw a frog and I pointed and the person said dakwo. So I got the word dakwo for frog.

On the second night I heard a frog croaking, [saw the man at the stream], and thought: ‘Aha! Human bond! I’ve learned a word of his language!’

‘Dakwo!’ I cried. The man shook his head [vigorously] in response. ‘Ibisaraya!’ It was not a dakwo; it was a different frog, an ibisaraya. This was my first exposure to New Guinean knowledge of natural history.

DUNAVAN: Were you ever scared?

DIAMOND: No. I was with my friend John. People in this area had been pacified, hadn’t attacked Europeans in quite a while. But, in retrospect, it was more dangerous than I realized.

DUNAVAN: As a doctor’s son, you must have been aware of the heavy burden of disease.

DIAMOND: Whatever I learned from Dad… was wiped out by the fact I was 26, full of bravado, and ignorant. In fact, my hygiene standards were not as paranoid as now. Consequently, I collapsed with dysentery and fever two weeks after arrival. I got malaria on my third trip after sleeping under a bed net with a hole in it.

Today I would not sleep under that tent without patching it. Claire, I did not really learn until a near-fatal boat accident. By that time, I had been visiting New Guinea for more than 15 years. I was a slow learner.

DUNAVAN: Do you feel a desire to help or any moral imperative when you meet traditional people and see vast disparities in their quality of life [as compared to ours]?

DIAMOND: No, because I would consider such a moral imperative on anyone’s part a bad idea. Because well-intentioned policies so often backfire, I would consider it a mistake not just on my part but on anyone’s part to try to change a society.

I don’t know what changes are going to work out well. I’ve just seen so many changes in New Guinea that have backfired. Here’s an example. What could be more obvious than providing education? The Australian colonial administration put a lot of effort into education.

It’s not that one shouldn’t educate New Guineans; of course you should educate New Guineans. But the approach of the Australians consisted of requiring all young New Guineans to have a few years of primary school—a noble, worthy ideal, but it backfired.

The tragedy… was a double tragedy. The first tragedy was that a few years of primary school do you little good: they don’t let you get a job. But a few years of primary school do take you out of the gardens when traditional New Guineans are learning to become farmers – and learning to become a farmer really is difficult.

New Guinea friends of mine who went to school told me that when they came back to their villages, they didn’t know what sweet potato to plant on what slope. The tragedy was that a few years of universal education were not enough to provide jobs but it was enough to undermine their ability to operate in New Guinea society.

DUNAVAN: Let’s look 50 years hence. Obviously languages are disappearing; the world will no longer exist in such a way that people can remain isolated. What will it be like for traditional societies?

DIAMOND: There’s a huge spectrum of possible outcomes. One possible outcome: if we in the first world mess up our own society, mess up the whole world… and you ask yourself who is going to be left after 50 years, well all of us here who don’t know how to make stone tools, don’t know what to gather, all of us here are going to starve to death.

The places in the world where people will survive are the places where – within living memory – people have been living in the forest and making their own gardens.

‘The World Until Yesterday’ is scheduled for release in the United States tomorrow

Comments

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It amazes me how some westerners can still make a profit from tarting up an account of different cultures and claiming this is new and sensational. Maybe it shows how gullible we westerners are. (See Krippendorf's Tribe).

Malinowski, Boas, Rivers, Haddon and others made a science out of Anthropology but it was hijacked from early days by adventurers and profiteers hiding behind the cloak of an academic reputation.

She questions Diamond's central thesis that by looking at small-scale groups in places like Papua New Guinea we are, in fact, catching a glimpse of "yesterday" and ipso facto a range of things worth (re)learning.

She rightly points out that "Digicel mobile technology now covers much of PNG - is not 'today' also today there?" She says the "first hand picture of the human past" claimed in the book 'emerges as a conceit that, by its nature, cannot take us far'.

"My dismay is that when New Guinea is so rarely written about for a large audience with serious intent, 'The World Until Yesterday' perpetuates one of the worst aspects of "our" WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) thinking.

"It keeps "us", as always, at the centre of the frame, separated from "them" as not much more than relics of "yesterday", an opposition that makes little sense outside historical time, and is of limited use in the entangled present of the 21st century."

In other words, Diamond is ethnocentric, paternalistic and possibly racist.

The University will play host to a book launch and public lecture by visionary Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Professor Jared Diamond.

He will discuss material from his latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What We Can Learn From Traditional Societies.

Drawing extensively on his decades of work in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, he will explore how tribal societies approach essential human problems, from child-rearing to conflict resolution to health, and outline how we have much to learn from traditional ways of life.

The lecture will be held from 6pm–8.30pm on Tuesday, February 19, in the UQ Centre.

Hosted by the School of Social Sciences and Brisbane's Better Bookshops, tickets cost $25, $20 (concession) or $18 for bulk buys of six or more.

Another quote from 'The World Until Yesterday'. Tell us if you think this gives a fair picture of PNG life.
_________

"For example, [Ross] you and I had never seen each other until half an hour ago, and in this half hour, I’ve not made a move to kill you and you’ve not made a move to kill me. In New Guinea, this would be unthinkable.”

Diamond recalls his friend’s experience, a missionary pilot in a remote tribe in New Guinea, who attended a gathering of clans that happens once a year:

“He said this occasion was absolutely terrifying. Here would come this strange person who you heard of, or that you saw once a year, and there was the person who killed your uncle, or there was the person who had abducted your sister’s cross-cousin.

"Every now and then someone would grab an axe and rush at someone else to kill them and had to be restrained by other people.”

Michael - That Guardian piece is basically a sensational promo for his new book and lecture at the Bristol festival. But it is lengthy and detailed and deserves further attention.

I take exception to this which is the first paragraph.

"Until the 1950s, newly widowed women on the island off New Guinea were strangled by their husband's brothers or, in their absence, by one of their own sons. Custom dictated no other course of action. Failure to comply meant dishonour, and widows would make a point of demanding strangulation as soon as their husbands had expired."

This has been picked up and repeated by many web sites - mainly to make the point of how 'primitive' PNG tribal societies are, although Diamond seems to be making the opposite point, which is that westerners have a lot to learn from tribal societies.

Pity he started the argument with a description of sons strangling their mothers.

I agree with Phil. This is pop anthropology, sensationalised to sell books and make Diamond a rich man.

What does he really care or do for the tribes and cultures he plundered (metaphorically speaking) for his source material?

And why to Papua New Guineans need a privileged western elite to explain their own customs to them?

Actually, I think Jared Diamond is a geographer, not an anthropologist.

But I'll get a copy of Shankman's book and read it with interest.

I've had reason to consult Mead on a number of occasions, most recently on her work with Reo Fortune on the Sepik at Kinakatem in 1932. I also consulted Nancy McDowells's alternative analysis (1991). The differences are quite stark.

I met Mead around 1971 in Adelaide and she still had her forked stick. Maybe she needed it to help carry around her enormous ego.

McDowell makes some interesting observations about anthropology in the 1930s, particularly about bending data collected in the field to fit into theory - exactly what Jared Diamond is doing today. Thankfully, the insistence on absolutes seems to be waning in modern anthropology.

I also find it curious to see many anthropologists (and other professionals) spending inordinate amounts of time criticising each others work, although I guess this is just healthy rigour at work in the discipline. In that sense I wouldn't be so eager to write off Freeman's analysis of Mead.

In any event I would recommend that any anthropological work be approached with a great deal of caution. It is usually only one person's interpretation and things change rapidly.

And Barbara, the old patrol reports are lodged in the National Archives in Port Moresby. They microfilmed them all in the 1980s and copies of the microfiche are held in many places.

In Queensland the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland has a set (although someone has knocked off the Western District and Western Highlands microfiche).

The microfiche are copies of headquarters files and some of the data, like area studies, are sometimes not there. The copies come off the carbon copies that regularly went to Moresby and can be a bit fuzzy. You can get PDF copies and take them home and blow them up to a readable size however.

New Guinea highlands society remains very lawless and violent (this is a place where holding the children of election officials hostage at election time is a routine tactic) but far less than it used to be.

Diamond just parachuted in, grabbed a few random anecdotes from a couple of locals, mixed it all up and made up the rest. This is of course neither anthropology nor journalism.

As for Derek Freeman's allegations that there was a "con perpetrated by the Samoan ladies on Margaret Mead," I advise reading "The Trashing of Margaret Mead" by Paul Shankman, which documents in exhaustive detail Freeman's long history of academic dishonesty and generally narcissistic behaviour.

Freeman's almost fact-free "takedown" of Mead rests chiefly on a highly leading interview with an obviously confused and senescent eighty year old woman who could remember almost no details of her involvement with Mead, and whose bona fides as an informant Freeman made no effort to verify.

Anthropologists now believe that Mead accurately documented adolescent sexual behaviour on her patch of Samoa, whereas Freeman never documented anything in his life (he refused even to provide a full transcript of the alleged "smoking gun" interview proving it was all a con.)

You realise that Jared Diamond's work is not without controversy. Like some other anthropologists he has been accused of making stuff up.

"Jared Diamond, author of 'Guns, Germs, and Steel', is being sued by two Papua, New Guinea, men who claim the award-winning science writer lied about their lives to prove that tribal culture is violent...

"The problem is that Diamond's notion of tribal culture is based on a fantasy of Diamond's own - one that was propagated by the New Yorker, which never fact-checked his story with the two men it featured as main characters. Wemp killed nobody, and Isum is not in a wheelchair - as you can see from the picture above.

"Indeed, the two men say they have never met and Isum has suffered no injuries at all. After the story went up online, Wemp suffered tremendously:

"He'd been accused of heinous crimes, which the men's lawsuit says he did not commit. Other mistakes Diamond made include extremely basic facts, such as which tribes the men are associated with."